The Perfectly Imperfect Woodland Garden

Post 73

I can imagine the perfectly imperfect woodland garden in spring.

For an understory it would have bluebells and forget-me-nots, daffs and species tulips, hellebores, trilliums, woodland poppies, primroses, may apples, wild ginger, ferns, barrenworts, money plants and plants I do not yet know the names of.

The midstory would be azaleas, rhodos, fothergillas, dogwoods, serviceberries and magnolias.

All this would be under ancient trees, with an modest farmhouse and a few well-used outbuildings sharing the plot.

And, of course, this bucolic kingdom (too small, comfortable and unpolished to be an estate,) would be somewhere near a convenient village center, but hidden away, maybe reached by a dirt road winding off a rarely-used street.

Could such a place exist? Yes. of course it could. In fact it does, tended by a retired geneticist who still comes out and digs up a primrose here and there to gift a worthy up-coming plant sale. May we all have her vigor, intelligence, generosity, humor, busy life and green thumb at 92! Hmmm, and would we had and have such virtues at an younger age too.

While few of us live in such natural splendor, many of us garden yards that are at least partially shaded by big trees. This expanse of spring loveliness is an inspiration of what can be done under such conditions.

All these plants spread on their own and grow well between tree roots.

Do you need some of the plants listed and pictured above?  if so, you are in luck. It is almost time for the Ned Wolf Park plant sale.

"Ned Wolf Park is located at the corner of Ellet St. and McCallum St. in the beautiful Mt. Airy section of Philadelphia.  This year we've scheduled our annual sale of perennials, shrubs, annuals & miscellaneous garden stuff for Saturday, May 11th from 10 am to 1 pm. "
http://nedwolfpark.blogspot.com/

Loving the Imperfect, Garden and All

Post 69

I talk about wholeness a lot on this blog, but rarely about some of the unpleasant parts of wholeness. So here--like dark clouds on a sunny day-- is a love screed affirming, deepening, some of what I have left out.

Sometimes--I really hate to garden. It's cold, my bones ache, it's dirty, I want to be inside. I want to be in bed. You can't throw your back out in bed (well, at least it's not likely at my age.)

Do you know how much work  a garden is? Even a low-work garden? How much dull, repetitive work there is? Work that needs to be done regardless of the weather. And it's not like I don't already have a job.

I do not care if it's good for me. I am getting no pleasure from it. And there is still more work to do. And more. How will I ever get it done? Not as young as I used to be. What was I thinking? What Was I Thinking?

Yes, sometimes that is what it feels like. Maybe not often, but sometimes. To pretend otherwise is to  cheapen reality.

But even when gardening feels like drudgery, there can remain three important things: hope, faith and love.  Nothing much this side of Heaven comes without effort. There are always good days and bad days. Anything worth doing looks impossible if you look at it in totality, but if you just put one foot in front of the the other, sooner or later it gets done.



I have found that when I work out of love the difficult bits are still difficult, but not impossible. Where as if I work out of more mixed motives, I have a harder time when I hit the difficult stuff. And it helps to assume and accept that there will be difficult stuff. Even in a garden.

To embrace reality means to accept it. I'm not one of those who thinks we completely construct our own reality through our attitudes and thought processes. But I do think our thought processes can make a difference to our behaviors, which reverberate through reality. To have faith and hope means to go on. To try to do good where you can. To forgive. To ask to be forgiven. To be open to grace.

Cause at some point the weather turns, your bones stop aching and this happens--

 

A foretaste, perhaps, of a truer being.

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All the photos in this post are of Erdenheim Farms, except for the last, which is of Rittenhouse Town.

Wissahickon Style IV, Lack of Pretension

Post 26

A bad back has increased my grouchiness while decreasing my inspiration. Hence my not keeping up with weekly posts, So I'm going to go for an easy topic: lack of pretension, to keep things going. 

By lack of pretension -- I mean everything from having an undisguised television set (no, not media center, never media center,) in the living room to a sign for your garden written in chalk. For me, the best of Wissahickon style is not hoity-toity,  but scuffed-up white shoe.

Here are street number tiles embedded in a schist wall. They are old tiles, probably Mercer, cracked and riven, much like the rock and mortar they are set in. One of the clues to real style is that it has an unifying integrity. Pretension usually shows itself up as the slapping together of various items with nothing in common but their value as status tags. Hence the odd fact that style can seem to reflect a moral state.

Time as eventual destroyer of all things is never recognized by pretension. Old objects are only valued as consumer goods. The imprecations of time as such are usually erased by the up-to-date or, even more oddly, by other old items from whatever historical period is currently au courant.

A true unitive integrity of style may be as impossible to achieve as perfectly human integrity, but for any attempt at either, humility is needed. And humility means being in touch with our true humanity, the humus of our being, that we are mortal, fallible creatures at the mercy of time and tide.

Architecture that rears up against this truth is unlikely, in the long run, to enhance human flourishing. But architecture that helps us own up to our humanity softens the imprecations of time. It can then become a comforting presence, and, as an unifying style, set an example of how to get things right.

Hostas and the Funkia of Scenic Decay

Post 10


It is easy, but unproductive, to imagine the garden as an idyllic Eden beyond time's throes.  There is no garden without time. Gardens are made of time

How I wish I had taken pictures a few winters ago when a heavy frost hit the uncut-back garden. A pale hosta, which had remained in leaf, wilted overnight, its fronds decayed into ghost leaves. The limp leaves, which fell away from their roots to splay out in a circle, had gone greyish white.  Unhappy at the time, I'd gathered them up and hung them from the bishop's hooks behind the Buddha. For a day or two they dangled there, tokens of decay, translucent, beautiful and properly sad.

In my carpool this week, I told a colleague how I like to let some plants visibly decay, while removing others--it all depending on how attractive the decay is. Since she is a new gardener, she asked me when to cut back her plants, most especially her hosta. It made me remember the ghost leaves, and note how a popular 19th century plant like hosta, once called funkia, remains perpetually in style. Every year there are new varieties while the old ones remain ubiquitous. Everyone, it seems, has some funk.
  


What other factors, I wondered, can make for good garden funk, a bit of scenic decay?

A surge of fresh roses blooming beneath a turning tree.

A scattering of fallen rose petals on a stone staircase.

                                 

"You love the roses - so do I.  I wish the sky would rain down roses, as they rain from off the shaken bush.  Why will it not? Then all the valley would be pink and white And soft to tread on.  They would fall as light as feathers, smelling sweet; and it would belike sleeping and like waking, all at once!"  -  George Eliot, Roses 

The froth of spent flowerheads nuzzled by a strand of Kiss-Me-Over-The-Garden-Gate

Fading flower of Oak Hydrangea against turning leaves and an Autumn Joy sedum blooming in a cute thrift-store vase .



Or how about the sight of zinnias with new blooms, mature blooms, and old blooms all in one gaze?





Pastorius Park

 In our culture such a huge amount of resources: time, money and effort, is spent erasing time. And to what end? To deny that in the long run there is only one end for mortal creatures?  One cosmetic company is now developing a pill to keep your hair from turning grey. Only drawback--you have to take it for at least 10 years before your hair starts turning, and then, for how many years after? What's next, some soil additive to keep tree leaves from turning color and falling in autumn? To erase time erases life, erases change, erases us.
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Pastorius Park

My perennial question behind this blog -- how does gardening change the gardener? --has perhaps one answer. Gardening embeds us in time. Most of our common culture does the opposite--it disembodies us into spectators while erasing time. By gardening we partner and co-operate with time.


Hence we learn through our bodies' labors that sometimes it is better and more graceful to accede to time's reality. To trust to something beyond our self-gratifying egos.  And so to let the leaves, all the leaves, fall where they may.

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How-to Hosta:  Hostas are originally native to China.  From there they were brought to Japan and Korea, and then, from there, in the mid-19th-century, to the Western world. Older versions make great groundcovers for shade and semi-shade. They come in all sizes, from smaller than an unabridged dictionary to bigger than a multi-cushioned sofa, but most end up at about 3 X 3. They also come in all shades and varigations of green, white, chartreuse and a waxy blue-green.  Some of the newer varities can take sun: most others will get leaf burn. They love our local clayey soil, sending down deep roots to deal with dryish shade. To make more plants just divide in spring or fall; small plants will fill in quickly. Be sure to keep watered for a few weeks after transplanting. Hosta are tough, adapatable, low care plants. So --  Enjoy your funk ( just, as they say, don' impose it on others.)

Mistakes, or the Misplaced Butterfly Bush

Post 4

Mistakes: you will make them.

Can you spot it? It's that blobitity lump of silver-green smack in the middle front. A Butterfly Bush I was deluded enough to think would stay small. It didn't, ruining an otherwise successful rock garden.  Plus, the bush's mass confuses the flow of space; instead of drawing the eye in, it pushes the gaze out. Which irks me. Part of me wants the garden to be better, perfect, a sort of garden porn. 
 
Do you see the problem here? Red myrtle, red maple and ... invasive Lythrum salicaria, aka Purple Loosestrife. In England it is a lovely, manageable garden plant.  Here it destroys rivers, clots streams and chokes wetlands. I must pull it out. Which hardly seems fair since I did not plant it. The wind and rain did. But it's my responsibility now.

The words humus, humility and human are cognate. Sometimes, as I garden, it feels as if humility is seeping up into me from the humus. And it feels like strength, not weakness, a beatitude of the garden.

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a process and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect: part of it is decaying, part nascent…And in all things there are certain inequalities and deficiencies, which, are not only sources of life but sources of beauty." Alvar Aalto

The Butterfly Bush is now in bloom, and true to its nature, it is making the butterflies very happy. It will bloom, on and off, from now till fall, when I will transplant it to a better place further back in the yard. It will still please the flutterbys, but also contribute to the overall beauty of the garden.

The beauty I want to create is a different kind of beauty than the usual, temptingly-perfect garden porn.  What I want instead, is a sensuous expression of the integrity and inter- and outer-connectiveness of a particular environment.  For me, to garden is to find and express a presence, an itness, a balance of energy and order of being, tempered to a loved and local, time and place. 

"Presence is why we love what we cannot eat or mate with... Presence matches our speed; thus it seems not flow, but all arrivals— The beginning mirrored everywhere. The true indictment. The end all through the story."  Les Murray in "Sunflowers"

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Addendum--posted the above yesterday and this morning noticed that a spider had thrown a guyline from the pink coneflowers (you can see them in the bottom pic,) to a stem at the back of the bush.  This pleases me, since around here, garden spiders are good news. They are nonpoisoness and eat mosiquitos and other pests. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How-to: Butterfly Bush or Buddleia davidii, is hardy in our area and easy to grow. It likes sun and some water (but not bog,) will survive drought, and depending on the variety, can be anywhere from 3 to 12 feet tall. The trick is to remember to prune it in the spring, not fall, and only after you can see the beginnings of new buds. For the most blossoms, prune the stems down to about 6 inches. If, however, you want to encourage height, you will still get some bloom if you prune it up higher. It can make an attractive, overhanging backdrop to a sunny or even slightly shaded border. Besides the lavender-blue pictured above, it also comes in a wonderful dark purple, white and even some reddish and orangey shades. It is a dependable, unfussy plant, but can look awkward if badly placed (duh!) or if left undeadheaded after blooming, since numerous curly wands of brown decay can be a hard look to make work.